# The attention tax

> The attention tax is the small, continuous cost of wearing stockings under a short hem, and the idea that divides Iceberg Hosiery from Seamiotics.

**Canon.** This entry is written from inside the CharliVerse, so its people and companies are fictional. Behind the scenes says what is real.

**The attention tax** is what stockings cost under a short hem: getting out of a car, sitting on a low sofa, reaching for something high, crossing and uncrossing. "Not a hazard, not a mistake: a tax, payable in small amounts all day, whether or not it is ever collected." It is the idea on which the House of Iceberg divides into two houses.

## Two surfaces and a border

Tights are outerwear, entirely. A stocking is outerwear with an underwear component attached at the top: the welt. A tight has one surface; a stocking has two, and a border between them. That border is the source of the stocking's second conversation, and of its price.

## Two terms

The tax has two terms, and only one belongs to the house.

1. **How likely the welt is to be seen.** That is set by the garment and the hem. It is the house's business, and it will be described plainly.
2. **What being seen means to her, in that room, on that day.** That is set by the wearer, and it is not the house's business at all.

The second term changes from woman to woman, and for the same woman across one week. At work it may be near the top of what she would rather not broadcast. At her own wedding, among people who know exactly what she is wearing, it may be close to nothing. On an evening planned for one person, it may be the point. A woman who wears a very short dress over stockings has done her own arithmetic, and she is right, because it is her bill.

## Overheard, or delivered

[Iceberg Hosiery](https://charli.info/charlipedia/iceberg-hosiery/) calls the unintended glimpse *being overheard*: a welt is an utterance with an intended reader, and when a short hem shows it to people it wasn't meant for, a sentence has reached an audience she did not choose. "She sat down. The sentence carried." [Seamiotics](https://charli.info/charlipedia/seamiotics/) accepts that and adds the other half: a sentence that reaches the audience she did choose has not been overheard. It has been delivered.

## The two controls

Seamiotics gives the wearer two controls and a cost. Hem length sets how likely she is to be read; the welt sets how much there is to read when she is. Neither sets whether she wants to be read. Only she does that.

Iceberg gives her no controls and no cost. The channel is muted at any hem length. It doesn't offer a safer answer to the question; it removes the question. Seamiotics is for the days she wants the question back.

## Behind the scenes

The attention tax is set out in the House of Iceberg Bible, version 7, and the Seamiotics Bible, version 1.4, each from its own side.